José Luis Torres Leiva has managed to make a name for himself in the reflective-contemplative advocates among those who study the new trends of modern cinema. Among his film projects are festival winners like ‘El Cielo, la Tierra y la Lluvia’ (2008) and ‘Verano’ (2012), which played in last year’s edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Now he’s just released a new film, a documentary this time, called ‘Ver y escuchar’ (2013). It had its world premiere in the FIDMarseille of this year, and made its Chilean debut at the Santiago International Film Festival, where it played in the Chilean lineup, and finally grabbed the Best Director prize from the Festival. This particular movie has quite a road ahead of itself, and it’s already bringing the prizes in.

Torres Leiva has flirted with the documentary genre before, like in the Chilean earthquake documentary ‘Tres semanas después’ (2010) that was filmed, as the title says, three weeks after the 2010 earthquake, showing us the destruction and despair of the people in the south of Chile. Then, there’s the hybrid ‘Obreras saliendo de la fábrica’ (2005) that at one point was named by art-film director and festival favorite Apichatpong Weeresethakul as one of the 10 best films that he had seen in his life. But here’s the thing, as the style of Torres Leiva has been almost a trademark in all of his work, either be fiction or documentary, in See and Listen this is subverted.

After years of making contemplative films with almost no dialogue, here there’s almost no moments in which there aren’t people talking, as this is essentially a movie about communication. We are presented with three situations/experiments of real life. The first one brings together a blind man and a deaf-mute; through their intermediaries, they have a day out, communicating to each other what their counterpart can’t experience. We hear descriptions of the images we see and descriptions of the sounds we’ve already heard, but we’re witness to each one’s struggle to explain something that the other can’t possibly understand, because each one has a mind that has never had the sense that the other has always been able to perceive.

Then we see the most emotionally powerful of the three stories, a father and his daughter, who is blind and deaf, only being able to communicate with the exterior world through her touch. The opening scenes of her segment show us how she is guided through a garden and given roses and trees to smell and touch, the only senses that she still has working fully. There’s a special method for her to understand what people are saying, as she isn’t able to see the sign language, she has to be spoken to her hand, with a series of gestures and signals that at times feel more like signs of love from those around her (her father and her best friend).

The final third isn’t as powerful. It features people who have only recently been blind or deaf-mute, where the conversation veers toward the more social edge of those with special capabilities. But while passionate and important, it isn’t in the same romantic and, at times, beautiful / emotional tone that the other two stories had.

With gorgeous black and white cinematography and a stupendous direction, this movie works more like an experiment, in which Torres Leiva tries to find beauty in the denial of the senses. He wants to be closer to the social reality of certain groups of society, yet he still finds more interesting topics and pure filmmaking moments, such as the beauty of describing the sound of a rock hitting the water.

Amicus Productions: Horror-Scifi

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)
The Skull (1965)
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)
The Psychopath (1966)
Dalek's Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
The Terrornauts (1967)
The Deadly Bees (1967)
They Came from Beyond Space (1967)
Torture Garden (1967)
The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
I, Monster (1971)
Tales from the Crypt (1972)
What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972)Asylum (1972)
The Vault of Horror (1973)-- And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
From Beyond the Grave (1974)
Madhouse (1974)
The Beast Must Die (1974)
The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
At the Earth's Core (1976)
The People That Time Forgot (1977)
The Monster Club (1981)

Hammer Pictures: Horror-Fantasy-Sci Fi

The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1935)
Man in Black (1949)
Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949)
Dick Barton at Bay (1950)
Four Sided Triangle (1953)
Spaceways (1953)
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
X: The Unknown (1956)The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Quatermass 2 (1957)
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
Tales of Frankenstein (1958)Dracula (1958)The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
The Mummy (1959)
The Stranglers of Bombay (1960)The Brides of Dracula (1960)
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
The Terror of the Tongs (1961)
Taste of Fear (1961)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Shadow of the Cat (1961)
Captain Clegg (1962)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Paranoiac (1963)
The Damned (1963)
Maniac (1963)
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
The Old Dark House (1963)
Nightmare (1964)
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
The Gorgon (1964)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
Fanatic (1965)
She (1965)
The Nanny (1965)
The Plague of the Zombies (1966)Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
The Reptile (1966)
Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)
The Witches (1966)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
Slave Girls (1967)
The Mummy's Shroud (1967)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Journey to Midnight (1968)
Journey into Darkness (1968)
The Vengeance of She (1968)
The Lost Continent (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
"Journey to the Unknown" (1968)Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969)
Moon Zero Two (1969)Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Crescendo (1970)
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)Scars of Dracula (1970)
Lust for a Vampire (1971)
Countess Dracula (1971)
Creatures the World Forgot (1971)
Twins of Evil (1971)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
Hands of the Ripper (1971)
Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)
Vampire Circus (1972)Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Straight on Till Morning (1972)
Fear in the Night (1972)
Demons of the Mind (1972)The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
"Hammer House of Horror" (1980)
"Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense" (1984)
Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1984)
Beyond the Rave (2008)
Let Me In (2010)The Resident (2011)